A speech synthesis system based on speech production process - Development of a Web-based system

摘要

The authors have developed a speech synthesis system based on speech production process. The system is a stand-alone type articulatory speech synthesizer based on the speech production model proposed by Sondhi and Schroeter. A script language Tcl/Tk is used to design the GUI of the system because it supports many platforms and can integrate programs written in another programming languages such as C language. In this paper, a Web-based speech synthesis system has been developed by taking advantage of the flexibility of the Tcl/Tk that is available not only for GUI programming but also for network programming. In the system, interactive operation for determining vocal tract configuration and vocal cord control parameters on a Web browser is achieved by using a Tcl/Tk Web browser plug-in. Synthetic speech sound is calculated by using CGI programs installed on a Web server after transferring the parameters by client server networking with Tel sockets. Effectiveness of the interactive system is shown for teaching materials in speech science.